Browser Wars (image from shoze.blogspot.com)

Between 2002 and 2004 Internet Explorer enjoyed domination of the browser market with 86% penetration.

In 2005 Firefox was launched and by the end of the year had 24% against Internet Explorers now fading 69%.

Parity between Firefox and Internet Explorer was achieved at the end of January 2009 (45%) and all designers started to get excited as CSS2 was launched and as far as beautiful web designs are concerned things started to get really fun, except that is for Internet Explorer as they decided to further ignore web standards – the public abandoned it in droves.

Chrome was introduced late 2008 and has mainly stolen users off Internet Explorer, up until the end of 2010 at least.

In April 2011 Chrome overtook Internet Explorer and as at July 2011 (the most up-to-date figures at time of writing) we have Firefox at 42% Chrome at 29% and Internet Explorer at 22%.

Internet Explorer has now lost the war and the interesting battle is between Chrome and Firefox.

The others:
Safari; peaked at 4% at the end of 2010 and now in a steady decline. It uses the same rendering engine as Chrome but is mainly Apple centric.
Opera; has never pushed through the 3% barrier but has a steady and loyal user base.

The future:
The war is between Chrome and Firefox. Microsoft may as well give up or use a third party rendering engine to help them with the seemingly difficult task of following agreed web standards.

What browser do use and why?

This is a hark-back to when the favicon.ico was only used in browser bookmarks or ‘favourites’.

All modern browsers (yes, even Internet Exploder) also place the favicon in the address bar next to your web address and this not only looks much more professional but also adds to a visitors peace of mind that they are in the right place, on the right website and haven’t wandered off onto the adjacent tab and are buying the product from the wrong company…

As a professional design company no website is launched without a favicon – mainly for the reasons above but there are a few others you may not have considered.

1. Error logs: There are a few files that a browser will look for on every page load and favicon.ico is one of them. If you don’t have one then it will generate a line in your error log for every page that is displayed. Whilst this will not harm anything it does make your error logs bloated and harder to spot other errors within the mass of error lines.

2. Browsers default favicon: If you don’t have a favicon in place then your browser is going to use the default icon from it’s own library. The trouble is that many webmasters don’t bother to install them and your page tab, bookmark and URL all look the same.

3. Software default favicon: If you are using blogging or forum software and don’t drop your own favicon on the server then they will use theirs. Not great as it will be  giveaway to your competitors and visitors of what system you are using. It will also confuse a visitor and probably not harmonise with your design.

The biggest secret is how incredibly easy it is now to create a fantastic looking favicon, no need for professional software, just go to: http://tools.dynamicdrive.com/favicon/ and you can have your own in a few minutes.

]]> http://ridgeberry.com/blog/?feed=rss2&p=126 0 http://ridgeberry.com/blog/?p=120 http://ridgeberry.com/blog/?p=120#comments Fri, 01 Jul 2011 15:32:11 +0000 Simon http://ridgeberry.com/blog/?p=120 Continue reading →]]> Web design Cornwall is one of our favourite search terms. We also target Website design Cornwall and for both those design orientated phrases we are currently on the front page.

Once you know what people search for when looking for your services be they web design or even print design then you can start to narrow down the parameters.

We add Cornwall to help narrow down the search. All our customers out-of-county and from the rest of the world find us because they see work we have done and want us to do the same for them.

It is the local, Cornish customers that will add ‘Cornwall’ to a search of web or website design.

We are very well placed for ‘graphic design cornwall’ and as this is our core market being at the top of the first search page is important to us.

So, next time you are searching for ‘web design cornwall’ pause for a moment and see how well we are doing on the page!

See you there…

However there are times when you shouldn’t use a stock image or at the very least purchase exclusive rights to it.

Why you ask? Apple have recently announced their new operating system and very nice it looks too. They have also purchased an exclusive right to the image but not soon enough it seems as the image has already been used for a French milk drink.

For a company as image conscious as Apple this is a bit amateurish. The folks over at reddit.com have done some investigation and determined the name of the photographer and that the Lion lives in a zoo… Personally we were interested to see how carefully the Lion’s mane was cut out!

The Lesson here is that if the image is important enough then get exclusivity on stock images or better still hire a photographer and get your own pictures.

Original reddit.com thread
http://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/i9g6r/is_that_the_lion_of_the_next_mac_os/

After doing the website and branding we were asked to help design Stick-At-It’s new drum teaching book. It was enormous fun to work on as the book incorporates lots of graphics that were created to promote the website. It was exciting to see how well the characters and graphics translated from web to print. Check out their website here: http://stick-at-it.com/

Amazon

The book is now available on amazon.com;
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Be-Drummer-Book-1-CD/dp/0956762875

“Kids will have great fun learning the drums with ‘Be a Drummer Book.1′ and at the same time gain a basic understanding of music theory, develop hand eye co-ordination and get to grips with timekeeping and listening skills with our play along songs! Practicing the drums shouldn’t be a chore, so have fun from lesson one.”

Be A Drummer Book 2

We will starting the second book in this series (Be A Drummer Book 2) next week.

Book Launch – City Music, Truro

Sam and I went along to the book launch at City Music in Truro with Tim Senior owner of Stick-At-it.com – one of the staff took our picture, I’m on the left, Tim is in the middle and Sam is on the right.

I’ve been holding back on writing this for some time. It’s hard to know where to start with the subject of internet explorer, but I’m not the first, nor will I be the last to vent my frustrations at this fundamentally flawed browser.

From a design and development point of view IE presents an entirely new set of problems that cost businesses like us a serious amount of time and money just to get a site working. For instance I have been wrestling with a drop down menu that displays fine in every other browser, across every other platform and including mobile devices. The code is sound, it passes strict validation. Yet internet explorer appears to have it’s own way of ruining (rendering) the site. Is it really that much to ask Microsoft to use a webkit engine similar to that of say Firefox or Chrome? With every IE update seems to come a new set of problems, surely the very nature of an update should be to fix bugs, not add yet more to the mix.

I’ve been trying for the last 2 years to engineer my code so it doesn’t require conditional IE code, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. But again this can take an entire day just to fix a site, a whole day dedicated to forcing a site to work on one particular browser. There is no way that the majority of the industry are wrong. We develop for it as we have no choice, but we pay for it in the long run, not just financially but also mentally.

The other major problem is the many many different versions, all of which have different behaviors, something that is fine in 7, doesn’t work in 8, but is fine again in 9!!! How are we as developers and designers supposed to work with that?? The goal posts are moving all the time and it seems that the user community have also finally had enough of the obvious flaws this browser presents to everyday internet use. 5 years ago IE had a fairly strong grasp on the market and over 70% of online users were using IE. Thankfully the world has woken up and seen the light, and in comparison IE now holds 21% of the browser market usage. That’s almost a drop of 50%!!! and quite frankly that’s music to my ears. Should IE cease to exist tomorrow the world would breath a sigh of relief and parties would break out in design studios worldwide. It really is that hated, and rightly so.

I can blame my general stress levels and ever worsening baldness to spending the last 2 years pulling out my hair out just fighting with IE. It shouldn’t be like this, the industry is a fun place. I have a feeling it would be an even better if IE ceased to exist.

The internet and a search engine are a key point of call for most people when needing to understand or gain your services. By purchasing your domain name it gives the added bonus of enabling you to have email addresses with the same domain, adding further professionalism and your businesses branding, it can also enhance your Search Engine Ranking.

A few points to consider when choosing your domain:

Size does matter

With domain names,  the smaller really is the better. It’s much easier than to brand, easier  to remember and much harder to misspell!

Easy to remember

Use your business name, or get a name close that’s easy to remember and sounds good. General words are best for this but since a lot of these are already snapped up  you should look for non general names or combination’s that can be easily remembered, and obviously relate to you!

Relate to your business

Using keywords which are related directly to your business industry will help your search engine rankings. What’s even better is if you can get your actual business name or a name similar to your company name as your domain name, this way all your off-line branding will pay off online as Internet users should be able to guess your domain name from your business name.

Avoid similarities

This means you should avoid choosing domain names that already have similar counterparts online, if you choose one of these people could end up on your competitors site rather than yours because they got confused over the two domain names.

.com is best

You should always aim for the .com version of a name, that’s what most people will go to after doing a search or after typing something directly into their address bar, if you register .tv or .net or any of the other available extensions and your competition has the .com version then you’ve just lost a potential customer.

So there’s lots to think about if you cant get your first preferred domain name!

But our first point of call is always http://www.123reg.co.uk

What do you think?

There is plenty of parking and the instructors offer group and personal classes including; spinning, boxercise and circuits.

Ian came to us with an existing brand and he already had a successful personal training business (that we did the website for many years ago!). He wanted a high impact website that would promote his new business venture.

The gym was opened at Christmas and already has a thriving membership. Visit the website and see what is on offer. See you there! http://www.stringersgym.com

They approached us to evolve their existing logo to give it a brand that would translate across various media.

Once the branding was in place we set about rebuilding the website, making the content more relevant, adding the ability to donate money and sell their own products as well as hire services and facilities. They can also easily update any part of the website themselves using the incredibly user-friendly CoPilot Web Control software.

As well as the branding and website we also designed brochures and promotional print material.

The website was designed to convey what they do and to attract funding as well as being relevant to the young people they work with and we added plenty of fun graphics and design features to make the website more appealing.

Have a look at their new website and branding at http://www.trelya.com